‘Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice:’ a sequel to raise you from the dead

**This article contains spoilers for the movie “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” as well as the original “Beetlejuice” film.

A shrinker named Bob, a cultist ex-wife, and a snaggletoothed demon baby–nowhere would you find these three things together other than the wildly outrageous “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”

As we walked into the theater, buttered popcorn in hands, the number one thought racing through our minds was, “Can this live up to the original?”

(To be fair, neither of us has seen the original “Beetlejuice” in years, but the way Tim Burton melds the creepy and the weird is not easily forgotten.)

As the intro credits rolled, our question was answered as we were transported right back into the wacky world of lip-syncing demons, confused ghosts, and irritating humans.

Poster for the original 1988 movie “Beetlejuice.”

If you’re like us and haven’t seen the original “Beetlejuice” in ages, here’s a refresher: After being killed in a car accident, the young couple Barbara and Adam Maitland find themselves trapped haunting their own house. When the Deetze family–a young couple with teenage daughter Lydia–moves in, the Maitlands attempt to scare the Deetzes away in order to continue their afterlife in peace. When their repeated attempts fail, they call in the help of Beetlejuice, a shifty, eccentric spirit who causes all sorts of lethal problems for the Deetzes, especially Lydia.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” follows Lydia as she becomes an adult, where she has since left the old haunted family home and has her own daughter, Astrid, as well as her own television show centered around her unique ability to see ghosts directed by her controlling new boyfriend (and soon to be fiance) Rory. After the news of her father’s death (and a very strange animated sequence), Lydia and Astrid, as well as Lydia’s stepmother Delia, go back to the house for his funeral. While in the house, Lydia keeps having unwelcome visions of Beetlejuice, while Astrid meets a perfect-seeming boy in town. When that too-good-to-be-true boy turns out to be a dangerous spirit who would do anything to be alive again, Lydia has to call upon Beetlejuice himself to save her daughter from the afterlife.

These plots complement each other well. Burton doesn’t take the story somewhere completely unfathomable and instead centers the plot on something familiar: Beetlejuice’s attempts to marry Lydia. The sequel, however, expands Beetlejuice’s attempts to marry Lydia into new areas as Lydia is also about to get married in the human world.

In an attempt to give the audience the same feeling they had upon their first viewing, sequels often go one of two common routes: play up the nostalgia or attempt to create a new and unique plot line that makes sense in the universe of the original film.

“Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” though, opts for a mix of both, which surprisingly enough, works.

The movie balances call-backs to the original with unique plot elements and characters. For instance, during Lydia’s father’s funeral near the beginning of the movie, a children’s choir serenades attendees with a choral iteration of Day-O. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” also features a sequence of Astrid biking through the town where she passes the red bridge covering that is well-known from the first film.

Arguably the most memorable part of the movie is the closing sequence with Beetlejuice, Lydia, Astrid, Delia, Rory, and a priest, which takes place in a church during Beetlejuice and Lydia’s supposed “wedding”. This scene is a clear callback to the original, where people were possessed and forced to sing and dance to the infamous “Day-O” song. Instead, this group was forced to act out ”MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris, Beetlejuice’s chosen love song for Lydia. This incredibly long scene is just so over-the-top that you can’t help but laugh, or if you’re like us, place your hand over your mouth the whole time in joy-filled disbelief. The scene perfectly embodies what the Beetlejuice franchise is built upon, wacky and bizarre humor that goes on for a little too long.

The classic Tim Burton style is present throughout “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” as best demonstrated by the movie’s over-the-top humor and odd macabre elements.

Thanks to all of this movie’s offbeat comedic moments, anything less than crazy sticks out. One such instance came in the form of the secondary plot where Beetlejuice tries to escape his dead cultist wife. Scenes with her failed to further the plot and weren’t even entertaining, as they typically just involved her walking around ominously, then sucking out someone’s soul. This lack of strangeness and humor divided these scenes from the rest of the movie and left us wondering if we had become two of her soul-sucked victims.

Similarly, there were other moments where the absurdity went just a bit too far. “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice” ends in a bizarre sequence that follows Lydia and Astrid through a series of life events that take place after the climax of the movie as a sort of epilogue. It begins with Astrid and Lydia taking their dream vacation where Astrid meets a guy who might just be a vampire. A moment later the two are getting married. This sequence, however, is completely thrown on its head when Astrid gives birth to a horrifying Beetlejuice baby we encounter earlier in the film. To say we were thrown off guard would be an understatement. Luckily, Lydia awakes a few moments later and we discover that this whole epilogue was merely a dream.

Despite some extremely odd moments and mildly boring plot points, the movie was a wild ride that left us smiling and put us in the perfect mood for the upcoming spooky season.

If you’re looking for a movie to send a shiver down your spine and put you in the Halloween spirit, look no further than “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.”

+5